Lack Of New Clean Air Plan 'could Choke HK'

A green group has expressed concern about government efforts to tackle air pollution in future after the expiry of the current Clean Air Plan by the end of this year.

Clean Air Network said it wants to see how the government plans to improve air quality in the years ahead, and that recently released regional air quality data showed improvement is starting to slow down.

The group's chief executive, Patrick Fung, said reasons for this slowdown include a lack of new measures imposed by the Guangdong and Hong Kong governments to reduce the emission source of pollutants such as nitrogen dioxide, and the growth in the number of cars here.

"We have not heard anything from them, and the Clean Air Plan published back in 2013 will expire [by] the end of this year, so we are very anxious about why there is no news from the government, and how we are going to clean up Hong Kong’s air after this year," Fung said.

He said that the Environment Bureau in 2019 said it intended to draw up a new Clean Air Plan that would begin this year, and that several district councils have passed motions calling on the government to carry out a public engagement process before launching a new plan.

But he said there hasn't been any follow-up action on the matter.

Fung told RTHK's Richard Pyne that for the next Clean Air Plan, he would like to see greater collaboration among government bureaux and departments, as well as specific targets, for instance having the Transport and Housing Bureau limit the number of new cars on Hong Kong's roads.

He also said the new plan should come up with ways to limit people's exposure to bad air.

"It was stated back in the Clean Air Plan of 2013 that Hong Kong is reformulating our own air quality policy to focus on health protection by aiming to manage not only air pollution concentrations, but also on population exposure. However, for the past few years, we do not hear anything very concrete in terms of data collection or identification of exposure black spots in the district level, so this is the other thing that we’d like to see in the new clean air plan."

Responding to an RTHK enquiry, the Environment Bureau said the government is preparing to update the Clean Air Plan and is looking at various measure to improve air quality. The bureau said the work is scheduled for completion in the first half of 2021.

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